Id Software games unlikely to come to Linux

Id Software technical guru John Carmack has said he doesn’t expect to provide Linux support for any future games.

In a post on Reddit, Carmack said Linux “barely makes it into” his “top ten priorities” and he is only interested in it academically, as a technical challenge.

“I don’t think that a good business case can be made for officially supporting Linux for mainstream games today, and Zenimax doesn’t have any policy of ‘unofficial binaries’ like Id used to have,” he said.

“I can’t speak for the executives at Zenimax, but they don’t even publish Mac titles (they partner with Aspyr), so I would be stunned if they showed an interest in officially publishing and supporting a Linux title.”

Carmack said he’s made a push internally to continue the tradition of releasing Id Software’s source code, but isn’t championing Linux ports in particular.

“A port could be up and running in a week or two, but there is so much work to do beyond that for official support,” he said.

“The conventional wisdom is that native Linux games are not a good market. Id Software tested the conventional wisdom twice, with Quake Arena and Quake Live. The conventional wisdom proved correct. Arguments can be made that neither one was an optimal test case, but they were honest tries.”